


the damage that you could want

by yude_londa



Series: it will come right back to you [3]
Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Angst, Bodyguard Song Mingi, Childhood Friends, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Modern Royalty, POV Outsider, Pining, Prince Jeong Yunho, Whump, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28855392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yude_londa/pseuds/yude_londa
Summary: It felt unnatural to see the prince without seeing Mingi immediately afterward. And if the harrowed look the prince adopted when all their leads came up empty was anything to go by, he felt the acute wrongness of it too.Hongjoong never thought that his prince, sheltered and cheerful as he was, could make faces like that.
Relationships: Jeong Yunho/Song Mingi
Series: it will come right back to you [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2104728
Comments: 28
Kudos: 76





	the damage that you could want

**Author's Note:**

> I should probably mention that I do absolutely no planning or researching when I write. There's nothing accurate about my fic.
> 
> Hope you still enjoy reading though!

_'Your loyalty to the prince is going to be the death of you.’_

Hongjoong had told Mingi, over and over, because he thought it to be true. Feared it to be true.

It was something that Mingi needed to hear, to get through his stubborn skull. For the sake of everyone who could lose him to his recklessness and learn to live with that. His team, his family, his friends.

Hongjoong just never thought he had to include the prince in that list.

Turned out that out of all of them, it was the prince who’d take Mingi’s absence the hardest.

He often contemplated the glaring oversight on his side in the aftermath, swinging by the hospital to check on Mingi for the sixth time that week. The private room given to Mingi came with the best doctors and nurses that money could offer. The prince settled for nothing less.

Anyone else could likely rest easy knowing that Jeong Yunho wasn’t the typical Royal who’d abandon their Shield the moment it cracked, that the prince would rather walk through fire than cause his guard any more harm. 

But this was Mingi, the man that fell under Hongjoong’s wings the day he ignored all the highborn people at the training center and picked him as his handler, inadvertently sealing his fate as one of Hongjoong’s people. 

His self-proclaimed responsibility, his stress-inducing partner, and his frustratingly dear friend.

A family, when Hongjoong never had one before.

Hongjoong wouldn’t be able to sleep peacefully without seeing his teammate, alive and breathing, with his own eyes. So he'd gotten very familiar with the procedures of visiting a patient at that particular hospital. 

Seonghwa had certainly seen him enough that the doctor just waved him in whenever Hongjoong came by. He even started treating Hongjoong as his unofficial patient, fretting over the dark circles under his eyes and forcing him to drink ginger tea whenever he could. 

Hongjoong, reminding himself that this was the man that saved Mingi and deserved all his respect and none of his ire, had tolerated Seonghwa’s particular brand of brisk care until he got used to it. 

Started expecting it, almost.

Besides Seonghwa, Hongjoong also had to get used to the lone figure sitting by Mingi’s bedside, having long given up coaxing, persuading and downright threatening Jeong Yunho to leave and get some fresh air at least. The Queen herself couldn’t move him, so Hongjoong didn’t think he’d have any luck in that department.

He wasn’t privy to the details of the talk the prince had with his mother but he had, apparently, threatened to blackmail her if she made any moves against Mingi. His spy in the hospital had looked mildly surprised when she delivered the news, as if she couldn’t believe their sunshine-and-puppies prince had the gall to bite his own mother.

A month ago, Hongjoong would have been the same.

But a month was enough for someone to reevaluate their lifelong opinions, and Yunho’s behavior was practically expected at this point. He still remembered the harrowing disaster that had been Jeong Yunho, unraveled the day Song Mingi went missing.

On that day, after the sheer panic and rage of getting a security breach on their own turf had passed, Hongjoong had been suspicious of all the reports that kept saying that everything was fine and in order. He didn’t think that the intruders would have left, just like that, after everything they had done already.

Still, he had conceded, when he got the news of their prince sitting safe and sound in the bunker, that perhaps their uninvited guests left out of fear of getting caught when the evacuation started.

A mistake on his part. A stupid one.

Hongjoong should have really known better when the one who reported the prince’s whereabouts was Jongho and not Mingi. The head of security had assumed, perhaps naively, that the man was finally relying on his teammates for once and not doing every little thing by himself. 

As if Song Mingi would have been that easy.

Hongjoong paid for his assumptions dearly when the cleaning staff found Wu Rong unconscious in one of their storage rooms, shot with a tranquilizer strong enough to make a horse dizzy. 

He knew, right there and then, that his best man had done something dumb and self-sacrificing, again, and saved everyone but himself. He had called all the free guards to his office and started an impromptu goose chase that went nowhere in the end.

The intruders had left, long ago, when everyone had been too occupied with their non-existent threat inside the palace to notice. 

One of their own, stolen from their turf, just like that.

In all his life, Hongjoong had never felt more like a failure. 

By the end of the chase, he’d already been preparing his resignation letter and calculating the amount of savings he’d need to start a private search for Mingi. He didn’t think the Queen would have given a rat’s ass about the one guard that went missing and there was no way Hongjoong was leaving Mingi to his fate. He was never loyal to the crown for the Royals anyway.

He didn’t account for the prince. 

It had been deeply unsettling (and frankly terrifying) to see Jeong Yunho in the aftermath of Mingi’s disappearance. 

Receiving the news of Mingi’s disappearance, the man had been pale, almost delicate in his shock. Then he’d sprung into motion, violently. Against the insistence of everyone around him, he’d left the bunker and ran straight to the place where he’d last seen Mingi. He’d circled the place once before seemingly realizing something, his face a picture-perfect example of dawning horror.

“Where’s the damn cape?!” he’d yelled, to the panicked confusion of everyone present.

It had to be Jongho who explained the situation to Hongjoong after that.

Mingi, quick on his feet and careless with his own safety, had set himself up as a decoy for the prince. The impromptu plan worked without a hitch, because of course it did, and now Hongjoong was one teammate short, Jongho looked gutted to be indirectly involved in his senior’s disappearance and Yunho?

Few had recognized him in his fury. 

Like a man possessed, the prince had involved himself in all aspects of the search, clamping down like a bear trap on anyone that so much as thought of going home. Suddenly, everyone was accountable for the disappearance of his Shield. More than one staff member had been crying by the end of the first night. By the end of the third night, Hongjoong had seen some of his own men pale whenever the prince came into sight.

Battle-hardened veterans, terrified of Jeong Yunho. 

When the Queen came by to see her only son wasting his time on a search for a guard, she hadn’t looked impressed. But she indulged the prince all the same, when he looked like he would have thrown a chair at her had she tried to stop him, looking sickeningly proud of the violence he displayed.

Hongjoong almost wanted her to stop him.

Jeong Yunho on a warpath was a double-edged sword. 

With the backing of a Royal, Hongjoong could do anything he needed to lead the investigation. But more than once he had to persuade the overzealous prince to let go of the poor person who couldn’t tell what they were doing three days ago because sometimes people just had bad memories and the stress of being glared down at by the future monarch of their kingdom didn’t help the matters.

Hongjoong had dreaded the day he might have to convince the increasingly paranoid prince of his own innocence. He almost asked Mingi how he handled the prince when he got into one of these bloodthirsty moods before remembering— 

Mingi wasn’t there. 

It felt unnatural to see the prince without seeing Mingi immediately afterward. And if the harrowed look the prince adopted when all their leads came up empty was anything to go by, he felt the acute wrongness of it too. Hongjoong never thought that his prince, sheltered and cheerful as he was, could make faces like that. 

Like someone had cut his chest open and shoved a block of ice inside, one moment. 

Like his world had ended already and he was wondering why the sun was still shining, the next. 

It made him wonder if there was a reason for Mingi’s blind devotion, one beyond duty, beyond history. If he knew, somehow, that he was the center of Jeong Yunho’s universe and that he had to be within his prince’s orbit to anchor him. 

But no, if Mingi did, he wouldn’t have been so cavalier with his own life.

Hongjoong also wondered, distantly horrified, if anyone could fill the impossible shoes that Mingi made and left behind, just so that their prince didn’t turn out to be like his Queen mother. Perhaps even worse. Because in the time that Hongjoong worked with Jeong Yunho, he had long since realized that everything human and kind about their prince had been outsourced. 

It answered the palace’s age-old question of how a woman like the Queen raised a man like the prince. The short answer was she didn’t, and the long answer was that she did but Song Mingi had been there to soften his prince’s edges, with devotion, with faith that said Yunho would be a good king one day.

Hongjoong couldn’t imagine a good future for their kingdom if the heart of it remained missing. 

And thankfully, he didn’t have to.

On the sixteenth day of a search that felt more hopeless with each passing hour, Song Mingi made it his business to disrupt all their plans and waste all their efforts by finding and delivering himself to their doorstep. As if summoned by the mounting grief and fear his prince had been burying the palace in, he came back into their lives with all the haste a half-dead man could muster. 

A message was sent to Hongjoong from a number that should have been out of order for years and couldn’t be traced, containing coordinates to a place in the middle of nowhere and an emoji of a beat-up bear. A fucking emoji.

Hongjoong had thought it to be a trap, a sick joke, perhaps. Why would anyone send him an emoji of all things? 

Turned out that the message hadn’t been meant for him. It was for the prince who had, upon confirming the text with bleary eyes and shaky hands, immediately ordered for a team of extraction and medics. Hongjoong, never slow on the uptake, had known immediately.

It was Mingi.

The resulting rescue mission was likely one of the quickest to be organized in history, with prince Yunho of House Jeong spearheading it like some kind of hero from ancient texts. Hongjoong, almost hysterical in that moment of finally, _finally_ , had compared Mingi to a princess waiting for her prince. 

Yunho had laughed the way he hadn’t in sixteen days. 

“I called him that when we were in school,” he began and then stopped, as if that was all to it.

There was history there, Hongjoong had thought, distantly curious. One that went back far longer than he expected. He almost asked for it when the attendants announced the arrival of their ride.

The people who weren’t stuck in close proximity with the prince during the most taxing time of his life had tried to convince the man not to board the rescue helicopter. Jeong Yunho, running on nothing but two hours of sleep and sheer spiteful will, had stared them down into meek silence, before permanently dismissing them from their positions.

Their PR team had been working overtime for a reason, Hongjoong knew. Jeong Yunho, without his shadow faithfully trailing behind him, was a cruel sun. Too bright, too scorching. 

Hongjoong had wanted to see the prince gentle his rays, at last, and throttle Mingi for all the worry he’d caused, but nothing had been going according to his wishes lately. 

The state they found Mingi in shouldn’t have been that much of a horrifying surprise, considering everything, but it was, it truly was. In a house abandoned and standing on its last leg, on a bed made of straw and wool, chained like a beast, laid a man so small and beaten that he couldn’t have been Song Mingi, the best of the Royal guards. 

The sound Yunho made at the sight had been that of a wounded animal. 

Hongjoong reacted immediately, calling for medics. 

There was a mad dash, a painful scuffle when the medics tried to get to their patient and got thrown back by Yunho, who seemed to have decided that no one was to touch Mingi, brittle and bloodied as he was.

With all the training and the authority afforded to the head of security, Hongjoong had to be the one to wrestle their half-feral prince into submission. He was rudely reminded of the fact that Jeongs were Royals that sought power in all aspects of their lives, including martial. The man held his own against trained fighters well enough on a good day but adding something primal and raging to that fight made Yunho a nightmare to deal with. 

Hongjoong, wondering why he hadn’t brought along Jongho when the man asked, had been seriously considering knocking the prince unconscious against the wall when he heard it. When Yunho heard it. 

The most welcome yet heart-wrenching voice. 

“Hyung.”

A hoarse whisper, delirious, pained. 

Yunho stilled, all violence and anger drained from him with that one word from Mingi. A shared history, Hongjoong thought again. Perhaps even a love story.

“Hyung’s here,” said Yunho, his voice the softest Hongjoong had ever heard from him. 

“Hurts,” Mingi whispered back.

Yunho’s face fractured, crumbled. 

He looked at Mingi, helpless and agonized for it, and then turned to the medical team, seeming to realize, finally, that they were there to help when he couldn’t.

He stepped aside and the people rushed in.

“It’s gonna be okay, Mingi-yah.”

What followed was perhaps one of the most nerve-wracking hours of Hongjoong’s life, and considering that he had defused bombs before, that was something. At least with the bombs, he could have done something. He hated that there was nothing he could do to help. All he could do now was just sit and wait, praying that they weren’t late when they got to Mingi. 

It was a feeling he shared with many.

In the hospital that they rushed Mingi into, they all sat, cramped on the limited amount of chairs meant for a patient's family. Hongjoong, Yunho, the rest of Mingi’s team, including Choi Jongho who somehow knew exactly which hospital to break into. Yeosang likely got the information for them. 

Considering Mingi’s single-minded dedication to his job, Hongjoong should probably be less surprised that the man didn’t have that many people close to him. Among the few people absent, Mingi’s mother was the one on a plane back from Shanghai. 

Out of everyone in the Song family, it was the woman who divorced the head of the said family and cut herself off that insisted on coming. Hongjoong didn’t know what that said about the rest of the Songs but it wasn’t anything nice, that was for sure. 

Apparently, she hadn’t heard the news of her eldest son going missing as the case had been under tight wraps and no one bothered to inform her. Yunho seemed to remember that when he got wedged on the waiting chair with Hongjoong.

No one was sure what it was that the woman had said about being out of the loop for so long but her voice had been shrill and Yunho had winced when he heard it. Hongjoong had wanted to say something snippy about in-laws before thinking better of kicking someone that was down already. 

Now, with nothing else to do, everyone waited in line, wearing the same clothes they wore the day before, some of them smeared with sweat, dirt, and god knows what else. None of them moved to change, not wanting to risk missing anything.

This could be the last they’d ever get of Mingi, they all thought, sick with the realization.

Finally, after what seemed like eight lifetimes, the double doors leading to Mingi’s room opened and a man walked out, his blue scrubs stained red in some places and his pretty eyes screaming exhaustion. Everyone stood up, and the doctor, one Park Seonghwa, looked like he wanted to go back in rather than deal with a horde of extremely worried and highly dangerous men.

When they started shouting questions at him, he held his hand up, as if to shush them. The room quieted. 

“He’s alive,” the doctor said, weary after hours of operation. 

The room broke into cheers, exhausted but still very enthusiastic. Hongjoong had to close his eyes in a moment of pure relief, feeling faint enough to collapse. 

_Alive_. Mingi was alive. He was still alive, and Hongjoong was still going to give him the scolding of his lifetime. He had to start working on it now. He’d need all the exhibits and examples of the dumb stunts Mingi pulled and all the white hair they gave him.

“And?” the prince said suddenly, breaking the moment. 

Hongjoong refocused, and the cheers in the room died a quick death. 

“He’s alive, but—and I want to make this very clear—he’s not well,” began the doctor, not one to sugarcoat his words. 

Hongjoong felt his blood freeze. 

“What’s wrong with him?” Yunho demanded, eyes taking on that wild look again. The doctor did not look the least bit impressed with the future monarch of his country, and Hongjoong, uncharacteristically, wanted to snarl at him.

The cheek of the man he’d admire later, when he knew what state Mingi was in.

“To put it simply, that man should be, by all accounts, dead,” was Park Seonghwa’s verdict. 

No one knew what to do with that.

And then the man started going into details, further condemning everyone present.

With each new information, Hongjoong felt his heart climb higher into his throat, choking him. 

Exhaustion so bad that anesthesia wouldn’t have been needed, malnourishment so acute that it spoke of weeks of starvation. Infections that almost led to septic shock, a broken rib that just barely missed puncturing his lungs, a fractured arm that might lose its full mobility. And then there was his back, which only worsened in the time it went without medication.

It was unsure if Mingi would ever be on active duty again. It was a miracle that he was breathing still.

There was a moment of utter silence. 

Yunho looked stricken, sick enough to throw up, and Hongjoong empathized, fiercely.

“With careful monitoring and physical therapy, he can recover. He just needs rest the most. Weeks, if not months of it,” the doctor concluded in the end, almost gently, considering all the grown men before him that looked as haunted as his patient. 

Hongjoong winced, wondering how he was supposed to keep Song Mingi in bed for that long. The man had a habit of sweet-talking his doctors and nurses into releasing him early and getting back to work still healing. Yunho seemed to be thinking in the same line. 

“I’ll get him to rest, I’ll order him to,” he said, a Royal after all.

The doctor nodded, seemingly done with the day. When he tried to excuse himself, Jongho piped up, voicing what they had all been wondering.

“Can we see him now?” 

Park Seonghwa’s eyes were gentle but his voice was strict. Somehow, Hongjoong felt chastised listening to him, the way he never did with the Queen.

“His immune systems are shot to hell. He has to be quarantined for a week at least,” he said. The slow once-over he gave them and all the filth they dragged into his hospital spoke volumes.

“So, no, you can’t.”

No one protested, not wishing to make things worse for Mingi, though they all wished that they could, none more so than Yunho. Park Seonghwa watched them, waiting to see if there was anything else. When there wasn’t, he left, leaving behind a room full of pensive and conflicted people. 

Once again, there was a heavy silence, brimming with unspoken guilt. 

Their prince broke it with an order. 

“Back to the hunt. It isn’t over yet,” he said. 

_We’re not letting off the bastards that did this to Mingi_ , he didn’t say. He didn’t have to. Everyone thought in the same line. 

Yes, they couldn’t do anything to help Mingi, that was out of their hands now. But this? This, they could still do.

With the phone Mingi managed to nick off from one of his captors, apprehending the people involved wasn’t hard. What was hard was stopping themselves from killing them. The interrogation, one that had been perhaps a bit crueler than it needed to be, had revealed a story that none of them liked. 

For daring to deceive them and flushing all their expensive efforts down the drain, Mingi had been beaten. Most of the injuries Mingi had was the result of them venting their anger. It would have been almost salvageable if that was all to it. 

But of course, they couldn’t have just let Mingi go after that. That was their witness, a well of information, and possible leverage. 

So they tossed him into a hut in the middle of nowhere and kept him captive, keeping him company frequently the first few days and then visiting less and less when they couldn’t get anything out of him, leaving him to waste away. Their excuse was that they didn’t have a doctor on their team and wanted nothing further to do with the seemingly useless guard they nabbed. 

And here was where Yunho had to be physically restrained lest he strangled some people. Hongjoong had almost freed him of his restraints when he got the reports himself. 

The image of Mingi, trapped and dying and unable to do anything about it, was horrifying. 

Inaction was possibly the worst thing that could happen to his teammate, Hongjoong knew. With medications that worked some days and didn’t on others, the man had a habit of keeping himself busy so he could ignore the sting in his back. With nothing to focus on but his own pain and his seemingly inevitable death, the torment would have clung to Mingi, even in sleep. 

The thought of it haunted Hongjoong. And going by the ruins of the prince’s room, it haunted Yunho too. 

In the aftermath, when Yunho bled the bastards dry of everything they had and put them behind bars for treason, Hongjoong invited the man to get shit-faced with his team. After the hellish ordeal they had, the prince could be called an honorary member by now. 

He accepted, to everyone's mild surprise.

The resulting disaster of tears and property damages was one that everyone swore to never mention again.

And Hongjoong wished that he could say life went back to normal after that, but it didn’t.

Even after knowing that Mingi was safe and sound and receiving the best treatment their kingdom could offer, even after going to see the man as often as they could and memorizing his visiting hours, none of them could shake off that acute feeling of loss. It was as if they had really lost someone, and perhaps, in a way, they did. 

This was the best Shield the palace had ever produced, the most steadfast and devout of them all, and he wasn’t as invincible as they expected him to be. He bled, he cracked and he had almost disappeared forever. This was the end of something, they knew. 

Though none of them realized just how final that end was. 

When Song Mingi, after two weeks of a medically induced coma and painfully slow healing, had finally opened his eyes, most of his team had been there to greet him. To let him know that he was safe, that he wasn’t alone, and that he had been missed. 

People had been torn between tearing him a new one, verbally, and smothering him in as much love as Mingi’s injuries would allow. Most of them ended up leaning towards the second option when they heard Mingi laugh, voice hoarse after weeks of disuse. The laughter was wordless and almost silent but they could hear the relieved exclamation of it still. 

_I’m alive, I’m here, I’m not alone._

Really, after that, none of them could do anything but pamper Mingi, having simultaneously decided that the man deserved nothing but all the soft things in life from then on. On his part, Mingi accepted all the well wishes and featherlight hugs with the grace of someone who thought he’d never get those again, giving back as much as he received, happy to be in the moment. 

But he also never stopped glancing at the door.

Yunho, Hongjoong realized with a start, was missing. The man who’d kept vigil by Mingi’s bedside since the second he was allowed, had wordlessly left when Mingi was set to be woken up.

Guilt was a hard thing to live with, Hongjoong acknowledged. 

Hongjoong still felt like kneeling and apologizing each time Mingi held back bitter tears during his physical therapy. The best of the Royal guards, unable to take more than three steps without losing all his strength. It was painful to see, and going by Mingi’s pale face and shaky hands, even more painful to experience.

Mingi, after the first four sessions, had tersely asked people to stop accompanying him and let him go alone. It was against the recommendation of nurses, who thought that a show of support would aid greatly in the recovery process.

He felt humiliated, rather than supported, Mingi had told Hongjoong when he tried to follow. 

After such a hollow statement, Hongjoong didn’t have it in him to come in uninvited. The guilt of it all, senseless, illogical, yet still so persistent, stopped him. Hongjoong didn’t think Yunho had it any easier. Knowing the man, he probably had it much harder.

For that reason alone, he didn’t push Yunho to visit Mingi. 

Though there were days when Hongjoong legitimately considered locking up his prince with his guard until they got back to being inseparable. Days when Mingi looked fragile and hollow and the only person who could possibly make things better for him was his prince.

“The phone was left by a mistake. I didn’t steal it,” he’d confessed to Hongjoong, when they were going over the grueling process of revisiting those traumatic times for a duly written report.

“They expected me to die. Didn’t bother to put up their guard in the end. I really was... nothing then,” he explained, each quiet word reigniting the hatred Hongjoong felt for those scum.

“I wasn’t even sure if the phone was a hallucination or not… I just did what I used to do when I was young and away from home,” Mingi continued. Stopped. 

“You called for your hyung,” Hongjoong finished for him. 

Mingi laughed, self-mocking.

“Put that way, it’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it?” 

_No_ , Hongjoong wanted to say. _Your hyung damn near tore apart the entire palace in the effort to find you, your hyung got drunk and started wailing like a child when he did find you, your hyung stood guard by your bedside the entire time you were out and hid the moment you woke up._

If Mingi was embarrassing, then so was Yunho, perhaps even more so. These two embarrassing men, they really deserved each other. 

Still, Hongjoong said none of it, knowing that it wasn’t his place. Yunho had to be the one to say it all. Mingi would only believe the words of his prince.

So the rest of the report was written in silence. 

“How is his highness doing?” Mingi had asked, just once.

Hongjoong hadn’t known how to answer his question.

The truth of the matter was that Yunho was doing simultaneously better and worse than ever. Better, because he was slowly but surely wrestling the power of the crown from his mother, effectively pushing her into early retirement and earning himself the respect of many. Worse, because that was all he was doing these days.

By Jongho’s report, the prince had ordered a bed to be delivered to his office and spent most of his time there. Hongjoong wasn’t yet sure if it was getting unhealthy, if an intervention was needed or not. Seonghwa certainly seemed to think so.

“Working hard and arguing a lot with the Queen these days,” was the answer he went with in the end.

“Is he winning the arguments?” was Mingi’s next question because, of course, that mattered the most to him. 

“Most of them, yes. His orders actually carry weight now,” Hongjoong replied. Mingi looked mildly affronted.

“His orders always carried weight,” he said.

_Only to you_ , Hongjoong thought.

“Speaking of orders, he ordered you to listen to the doctors and rest well. If you don’t, he will be coming down to get you,” he told Mingi, watching his face go soft and melancholic.

“Will he?” There was a definite wistfulness in Mingi’s voice.

“He will,” Hongjoong affirmed.

He wondered if Mingi was going to act out and force Yunho to come. If Hongjoong could help somehow. It was almost a month of visits from practically everyone in Mingi’s life except the one person he wanted to see the most and the silence on the matter was testing the last of Hongjoong’s resolve. 

“Well, he won’t need to. I’ll follow his order,” Mingi said, seeming to think better of it. 

Hongjoong sighed, somehow disappointed but not surprised.

“You always do.”

In the end, Yunho visited, just once, when Mingi was about to be discharged from the hospital and run to his hyung, no doubt.

Hongjoong wished that he didn’t.

When he heard of the prince’s arrival from Seonghwa and entered Mingi’s room to see how the reunion was going, he had expected the two men to be awkwardly yet earnestly talking to each other, catching up on months of their life at last and mending the bridge between them. He’d felt hopeful about the situation he’d get.

What he got instead was this: 

Yunho, voice even and distant, delivering cold words of thanks for years of service. He stood, in all his princely regalia, stance and bearing perfect if not for the hands shaking behind his back, the fingers digging blood into his own skin. 

Mingi, face stoic and on the verge of cracking, unable to deny his prince anything, not even this, not even the knife to his heart. He too stood, with a discipline that was beaten into him since childhood and turned everything he wore into a uniform. 

And _this_ :

“Song Mingi, you’re dismissed from the Royal order,” said Yunho, solemn in a way that screamed finality. 

And Song Mingi, a Royal Shield til the bitter end, even broken, even abandoned, did as he had always done. 

Turned his eyes to the ground, bowed his head low, and said— 

"Understood, your highness."

Hongjoong wondered if he’d get saddled with treason if he punched his prince.


End file.
